Fifty-Two, Sixty-Four, or: Cargo; Rift; Nostalgia; Gold

Robert Smith is fifty-two today.

I love The Cure. They sucked live. Whole bunch of air-guitared songs, though.

• Fearmongering.
• On the above.
• One possible future.
• How, not if.
• The meaningless nation state.
• 1988.
• Pig-tracking.
• Four kinds of humans.
• Megan McArdle mocks you.
• I don't know whether Agi still reads this shitty blog, but this is for him.
• Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?

• It's true, and tonight is the biggest game ever since the last biggest game ever until the next biggest game ever. 
• 50 poetry blogs.
• Paradoxes of international literature.
• Swallowing the surface.
• Six stoner novels. The only one I haven't read is the Tolkien.
• Popsnot.
• RIP Gerald Smith.
• UPDATE! The entire new TV on the Radio album. Holyfuck.
• Six different ways.
• Fire in Cairo.
• A strange day.
• Charlotte sometimes.
• Seventeen seconds.
• Meathook.
• Iggy Pop is 64 today:

LIKE A LION

Carl Phillips

Fallopian, estranged somehow,
forgetless against a backdrop of plain
sky, the limbs of the trees
fail, and rally. Everywhere
the kinds of patterns that
should be breakable, but by now it's
been this way, it seems, forever. The wind

strikes. The wind dies down. To amplify
what's true past recognition—never mind
the cost ... Hard to believe, though I
do believe it, that that's all
pleasure meant, once. Why not? Why
not be totally changed
into fire, as they used to say, I say
to no one. Cargo; rift; nostalgia; gold. I

fairly sway with my own aloneness, the only
half-blinding after all and, therefore,
not so unbearable flash of it, and the years
of my life, reducible to a shuddering
scant reflection in a body
of water nowhere visible, stir,
stir back.

I've seen Iggy roll in glass and slurp fans' spit off his arm, but his appearance on American Idol is really creeping me out.